Some nerdy requests from an unhappy iTunes user.

Okay, I like to bitch about meaningless stuff on a Sunday sometimes. I dunno, it's cathartic I guess. I was working with my music library today and it's massive (about 12,000 songs). But I have to use iTunes because I have a Mac and an iPod. Sadly iTunes kinda sucks. It could be so much better but the good folks at Apple seem pretty happy with the status quo since they're still moving lots of units. Anyway, here's a letter I sent asking for some improvements:

Dear Apple, I am continually disappointed (but not entirely surprised) that newer releases of iTunes focus almost exclusively focus on ways to sell more product without making some simple but greatly beneficial enhancements to the overall usability of the application.

One thing that needs to be done is to allow people to have multiple columns available for the "Source" pane. If you have a lot of music and a lot of lists it is a real hassle to have to click and drag down an endless column. I use folders to organize my lists, but even then there can be enough folders to make navigation difficult (especially with my 80 GB iPod mounted.) I hate to say it, but you could learn a thing or two from WinAmp in this regard.

Allowing for the use of multiple libraries without having to Option-start iTunes would be another major improvement. With massive libraries of content now available it is more and more common to have information stored on a variety of removable/external media, and therefore it would be nice to have the capability to have iTunes recognize this media on the fly, especially if the start-up drive has limited capacity.

Finally, with the death of DRM I don't see why iPods should not be re-opened to allow users to manipulate their file structure manually on any computer like was possible in earlier versions of the iPod. Specifically, it should be possible for the user to use the iPod as a library that can be opened on any Mac (or PC) for creation of playlists, etc. as well as a playback device.